Zodiac Killer (2004) Graveyard Frank leaves Tower Records and heads down Broadway. He shoves the DVD into a suit pocket. Ulli Lommel’s Zodiac Killer (2004), for a small picture, is widely available. Lion’s Gate Entertainment had sailed it through to DVD on 19 July 2005. Zodiac is long on words and short on budget and looked it. But whaddayagonna do? The production team was a plucky bunch, committed to shoot several more flicks through LGE. And Frank, having pitched some scripts to them, thought he’d oughta bone up on some of their source material. But that wasn’t why he was back in the Big Apple again. A small venue up in Spanish Harlem was to perform Scrapmetal Jesus, a one-act Frank wrote while sitting in “The Loose Caboose” (Home of the 50¢ Draft) on the Lafayette, Louisiana Strip. Frank wipes the unseasonable late September sweat from his brow, pulls the flyer from the breast pocket of his tweedy professorial blazer and reads it one final time:

"SHOTS IN THE NIGHT" A Theatre & Film Fusion Night At Carlito's Cafe 1701 Lexington Avenue (Between 106 and 107) 7:30pm-10pm Host: Ed Malin and Kristina Leath

Location: Carlito's Cafe1701 Lexington, New York, NY

When: Sunday, October 2, 7:00 pmPhone: 212-348-7044 Hop the 6 train to the 103rd street stop and enjoy an exciting evening of short films and theatre pieces by emerging artists. Presented in mixed order, the evening hopes to promote a change of artistic pace, a mingling of people and art forms as well as collective creative ideas! ABOUT The Venue Carlito's Cafe is a multi-cultural art space/cafe/bar founded by “ART FOR CHANGE” to promote budding Multi-cultural artistes in New YorkLocated at 1701 Lexington Ave., Carlito's is on the Upper East Side and in the heart of “El Barrio” welcoming a wide array of artists ranging from painters to musicians to dancers to actors to film makers and beyond.

About the Hosts Ed Malin is a playwright whose work is being featured in the 2005 NYC Fringe Festival and has on-going projects with Manhattan Theatre Source. For more info: www.Temeritytheatre.com Kristina Leath is a screenwriter who has completed three shorts films one of which was submitted to the Cannes International Film Festival. For more info: www.geocities.com/boonie214/KristinasWorld.html So, come and enjoy a night of great live performances, films and networking that’s far from commercial and all about the fusion of ART! $5 suggested donation. The 1st & 3rd Sunday Nights each month, 7:30 pm @ Carlito’s Café. Frank crumples the flyer and hooks it into a wastebasket. He hopes they got someone handsome to play himself. It was fiction after all.

Blood Freak (1972)

Frank was waiting for a six-inch turkey club at a Cracker Barrel convenience store on the Strip in Lafayette, Louisiana, and thinking of Albert Fish… Albert Fish of Washington DC had a head injury from a fall off a cherry tree in 1877. By the age of twenty he began to travel across 23 US states involved in house-painting, masochistic-homosexual relationships, raping children, cannibalism and bible study. He also liked inserting needles into his body near the genitals; acts of pain sexually excited him. Albert Fish, the ‘Brooklyn Vampire’ committed hundreds of sexual assaults and 16 or more murders before being sentenced to death by electrocution at Sing Sing in 1936. He called it ‘the supreme thrill of my life.’ The first electrical charge failed; it was short circuited by all the needles Fish had inserted between his testicles and anus over the years. It took a second massive current to finish the blackened Fish off. Frank concentrated this true ‘blood freak’ because the thought of turkey reminded him of the movie of that same name. And, if he thought of Grinter and Hawkes’ infamously bad Blood Freak (1972) while he idled in the chip aisle, he would burst out into uncontrollable laughter (and gobbles) and probably over topple over the rack of pickled pig snouts, gator jerky and pork rinds. For those not in the know, the pro-Christian/anti-drug Blood Freak (re-released on DVD by Image Entertainment on 9 September 2005) is one of the few films that can be recommended solely for their sheer absurdity. Blood Freak stars Hawkes (A former Eastern bloc bodybuilder, former Mr. Canada, former Tarzan, current inept exotic animal keeper) as Herschel, an unlikely biker-slash-‘Nam vet torn between a swinging sex kitten and her ultra Christian sister. Meantime, their daddy gets Hersch a job eating experimental turkey on his poultry farm. Obviously, a combination of tampered turkey and some wicked-ass pot (truly, Hersch gets the DTs after a single joint) turns our hero into bloodthirsty gobbling turkey monster. Didn’t his mom tell him that if he ate that much turkey he’d start to look like one? He looks like the not-so nice cousin of the San Diego Chicken, trying to shove bloody limbs into a papier-mâché beak. Only clean living and prayer can save Herschel now! “Perhaps Hersch needs to go cold turkey?” Frank snorts and knocks a stack of Penthouse Letters off the magazine stand. Details are too bizarre to expand upon. To be honest, despite Hawke's spastic transformation into a turkey, the camera effects are kinda cool, although are probably just a result of poor lighting. The second half of the film is very dark and often hard to follow. Hersch also cuts the leg off a drug dealer with a power saw. A real amputee is used so there is no “hidden limb” in the effect. However, a prosthetic spurting red paint doesn’t look much real either. Hersch’s war wounds are more convincing: in reality, Hawkes was badly burned on the set of one of his Tarzan flicks thus fating our side-burned, muscle-bound hero to not rise above the B-classics. “Oh come on,” the nay-sayers whine. “Certainly lack of talent first-doomed Hawkes career!” But, need Frank remind anyone of another ex-Eastern European body builder (with less cool ‘chops’) who festers in Hollywood blockbusters (and—ulp!—politics)? Truly, though, what makes the film for Frank, if not all this aforementioned silliness, is co-director Brad Grinter as the narrator. He looks like a sad Vincent Price (House of Wax; De Toth 1953) with uncombed hair and sagging faux wood paneling. He chain-smokes and reads off a script (one reviewer calls him coy for looking away—he’s reading the lines, idiot!). At the film’s climax he ironically breaks out into an uncontrollable smoker’s hack while lecturing on the evil of recreational drug use. Any other directors would have filmed a second take. Any other take. But Hawke’s and Grinter are not any other directors!

If not completely confused by the fractured Hawkes-Grinter vision, stay around for the featurettes included on the DVD. These include the 1969 skin-noir featurette The Walls Have Eyes, Brad Grinter, Nudist, and Narcotics, Pit of Despair. Pit easily rivals Reefer Madness (Gasnier 1936) in dated health class drug paranoia. Classic line: “Man, get with the countdown. Shake off this Square World and blast off to Kicks-ville.” Walls has a simple formula: find a way to link an anti-drug message with full frontal nudity, and then find a reason to play all that footage a second time. Nudist is truly just disturbing. You just have to watch to appreciate all this bad-goodness--or good-badness?.

Listing all the bad things which are so so damned entertaining about Blood Freak is impossible and so many other reviewers have described, speculated about, and interpreted the film to death. Just wonder what Christian money was backing drive-in horror movies in the early 1970s?! There’s just something about a film with no redeeming value which will make you smile and groan when you are enjoying a turkey sandwhich light years away. Blood Freak is simply a total tryptophan-trip!

Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter (1974)

Frank’s cell phone is generally an annoying little device that plays “South of the Border (Down Mexico Way)” (He preferred to imagine it was the Keely Smith version, as opposed to Sinatra) whenever the rare person was trying to reach him. Over the last few days it had been ringing seemingly constantly to him, though probably no better than 4 or 5 times. Mostly it was girl friends (No, never girlfriends or even girl-friends) wondering if he had made it out of the city before the storm—and relieved that he had, to remind him that they still had no future together. Frank was, in fact, on his way to the beach when the hurricane hit, and for no other reason than to see pretty ladies in bathing suits. He was, after all, despite what a slew of g. f.’s wanted to think, a man. A normal man with all the usual proclivities. And, in a second turn of luck he had stayed on I-10 past his usual spot in Biloxi to instead seek out Virginia Beach. It wasn’t a place he had been to before, but he had just heard the name somewhere and liked the sound of it. But, of course every bar on the Virginia Beach strip was tuned into suffering and destruction back home. And Frank hopped joint to joint hoping to escape the misery of the 24-hr coverage. And he couldn’t, until he happened on a little out of the way emo place that had their tube turned to the classic Hammer film, Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (Clemens 1974) Now for those you who own or wish to own the DVD copy there are two initial caveats. 1. The grizzled man of the cover is not in fact Captain Kronos, but his friend, Dr. Marcus. Kronos is more the blonde bimbo type. Indeed, C. K. was Buffy long before Buffy was Buffy. 2. The DVD release date is generally given as 9 August 2005, although the title has been widely available prior, if you check the $4.88 bins at your local Wal-Mart. It is unclear whether this is simply a re-issue or not. The “new” DVD case gives a copyright of 2003. Captain Kronos is mostly known for what it was not: a new franchise to save the dwindling box office returns for Hammer Studios. It failed to pay off and no other installments were produced. In the previous decades the studio had enjoyed great success putting a new spins on horror staples such as Dracula, Frankenstein and the Phantom of the Opera, very, very often featuring Peter Cushing (Star Wars: Lucas 1977) and Christopher Lee (Lord of the Rings: Jackson 2003) as well as original cult classics such as Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (Baker 1974) and the Quartermas Xperiment (Guest 1955). However, after Kronos soon fell into decline and pickings have been slim for the past 30 years.

Captain Kronos is a simple tale of a swashbuckling swordsman who fights vampires with help of his hunchback sidekick. The story moves as fast as C. K. pounding across the meadows on his horse followed by his hunchbacked assistant, Prof. Hieronymos Grost, close behind in his cart. They quickly find themselves in a village where vampires are sucking the youth out of young girls. Kronos and Grost are soon on the case using a mixture of old-timey wisdom and more conventional cutlasses and crosses. Even better, they pick up a hot chick for the captain along the way. C. K. V. H. isn’t bad, and it isn’t shot all that poorly either. Although the picture looks pretty good, the trained eye noticed some flaws, perhaps most obvious is that the film really contains no night exteriors, pretty uncharacteristic for a vampire flick, but also very cost effective for a studio. Here, the vampires simply cover themselves with a black hooded robe. Still the film has a slick, mod feel (Clemens went on to direct the New Avengers series) It also contains many memorable lines and scenes, Frank’s favorite being the exclamation as to the belief in the existence of vampires: “Come now! What could be more improbable than God?” When Dr. Marcus gets bit, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at C. K. and Grost’s antics trying to find a way to dispose of him. After all, H. G.: There are as many forms of vampire as there are beasts of prey!

C. K.: As are the methods of their destruction! The gawking, on looking villagers don’t seem to know how to react either. But, all and all, this oddly discernable humor propels the film. In fact, some consider it to be Hammer’s answer to Polanski’s monster comedy The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck (1966). In the end, the wry humor is the selling point of the movie, taking it from being a not so scary or gory movie, to an amusing entry to the vast vampire genre (off hand Kronos, is possibly one of the least scary captains of the 1970s, somewhere after Captain and Tennille and Captain Fantastic)—certainly a must see for fans. Its more entertaining than recent “hammer (and stake)” films like Blade (Norrington 1998) or Wes Craven Presents Dracula 2000 (Lussier 2000). Anyway, if nothing else Frank finds it to be adequate escapism from viewing the tragedy and loss of life in the B. E. he could only hope that Iris and Jerry had gotten out too. When the credits roll, Frank leaves the emo club, hits the ABC state liquor store for some Christian Bros. and then to a gaudy, pastel-painted hotel to set up his laptop. He’d have to get comfortable. It seemed like it’d be awhile before he could get back into the 9th without a pirogue.